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Basov's Invitation Tales from the Soviet Union A Diary of Seven Visits 1969 – 1989 Rolf Gross Pacific Palisades 2004 Introduction Russia and the Soviet Union have loomed often ominously large throughout all my life. Konrad Gross, a grand-uncle and botanist had emigrated to St. Petersburg in the 1890s. In my early childhood we occasionally received letters and photos from him and his Russian family. In 1943 Konrad disappeared without a trace in Stalin's purges. During World War II my image of Russia became colored by fear and propaganda, until, by the end of the war, we were overrun by the Soviet army in our home town in Silesia. My father was rounded up before my eyes. He survived, because the Russians, before shipping him to Siberia, released him with typhoid fever, which they feared. To feed my family I had to work for a Russian car repair shop until we were deported to Western Germany in 1946. However, these traumatic experiences from the end of the war, I was 14 when we were expelled from Silesia, did not leave any bitterness or paranoia, only a deep curiosity about the Soviet Union. Adventure-lust took me to America, where I finished my PhD and married Barbara, and fate brought it that in my job in the American defense industry—once again the Soviet Union assumed superhuman proportions. An invitation by the Soviet Academy in 1969 to present a research paper in Moscow opened a singular opportunity for me to explore the USSR. Captivated by what I found and beguiled by the people I met, this first invitation was followed by seven more visits over 20 years, during which the Soviet Union slowly disintegrated. A unique opportunity. Because my work was associated with the US military, I was highly exposed and never kept a written diary of these visits. Any written material could have been used against my Soviet friends, who trusted me. But the encounters I had were so intense, that they have remained most vividly in my memory. On the urging of my Western friends I collected these "Tales from the Soviet Union" in the following pages for the first time. Tales, because although they are told in the form of a loose diary, some parts, though "true", have more of a novelistic character— especially the stories from my visits to Georgia. I interspersed them with personal commentaries on historical events, as I saw them then or now after the fall of the Soviet Empire. Basov's Invitation 1969 - 1972 It all began in May of 1969 with an invitation by Nobel-Laureate Academician N. G. Basov to a Symposium on Chemical Lasers. It was addressed to Ted Jacobs, my group leader at Aerospace Corporation and to me. Considering that we had just begun to work in this new field, it was a great honor. Unfortunately this honor had several thorny political problems: We were involved in a cold war, and I worked in a classified laboratory supported by the US Air Force. Basov was a famous scientist, but the symposium would take place in Moscow. It seemed that it would take a superhuman effort to get permission to attend the meeting. In the end Ted relented his seniority, he felt in no mood to travel to the Soviet Union, their elevators did not work, he didn't speak Russian, and his grandfather, who had come from there had sworn a solemn oath never to return.... "Go," said Ted and added with a laugh, "enjoy yourself!" I dived into the preparations, flew to Washington to persuade our Air Force counterpart, was interviewed by the president of Aerospace Corporation and visited by representatives of several intelligence services. Everyone asked the same question, why was I so eager to go to Russia? "Because," I told them, "somebody has to stay in contact with the Soviets or we will kill each other by accident. Chemical lasers is a new field with military potential, the Soviets are active in it. However, from merely reading their literature one cannot get a clear picture of what they are up to. The symposium is an open door we should take advantage of." This explanation worked.—I didn't mention my personal wish or need to come to terms with my traumata from end of the war, and never voiced my intellectual fascination with Russia, its artistic heritage, its deep religiosity, and contemporary ideology. Few would have understood these personal motives in the environment I worked in. Sending the acceptance letter through Aerospace—it would have been crazy to send mail to the USSR from my home address—required the signature of three levels of managers. It would always surprise me that the civilian administrators—Aerospace was a civilian organization supported by the Air Force—were much more apprehensive in these matters than our Air Force counterparts, who supported me for years without reservation, because—I would joke—of my German accent.. Let me back-track: In 1968 Ted Jacobs and our division manager, had burdened me with the task of inventing a novel, powerful, continuous chemical laser. How to do that was my problem. In such a laser, a chemical reaction produces large numbers of vibrationally or electronically excited molecules which are then forced by mirrors (an optical cavity) to emit their energy all at once, in one large burst of coherent radiation. Three such reactions had been explored at Prof. Pimentel's laboratory at Berkeley, one produced excited HF (hydrogen-fluoride) or DF (deuterium-fluoride), an analogous one excited HCl (hydrogen-chloride) molecules. A forth reaction produced exited I (iodine) atoms by photo-dissociation of various iodine compounds. Because of the very large exothermicity (energy content) of the hydrogen-fluorine reaction our choice fell on this molecule. We had some technical experience elsewhere at Aerospace in harnessing these gases, because they powered the rocket of the moon-lander. Ted was an excellent gas-kineticist (chemist), I had been trained as a gasdynamicist (aerodynamics and physics) and had a rather vague understanding of chemical kinetics. Neither of us knew anything about lasers, cavities, or the like. However, as it turned we didn't have to search for elusive photons, the reaction produced so many excited states that almost any pair of mirrors was sufficient to make the HF molecules lase. We first duplicated Karl Kompa's pulse laser experiments at Berkeley, how to translate them into a continuous laser was less clear. As a first approach I came up with the idea of mixing hydrogen and a suitable fluorine compound in a shock tube and forcing the excited HF molecules to lase behind the moving shock. Against all odds—the good kineticists saw so many reasons that this couldn't possibly work, the temperature was too high, there would be too many deactivating collisions, etc., etc... I was fearless but ignorant of the gasdynamic complexity behind a moving shock in an explosive gas mixture—I made it work. My plan was that this experiment would allow us to carefully analyze and model the reaction, before we translated the entire setup into a moving flow in which a shock wave was kept stationary. I soon learned that at higher concentrations the reaction was so powerful that it "blew-out" the shock wave. And the reaction was too fast, the inverted region too small to provide a large enough medium for a powerful laser. What we needed was a gentle, stationary, low-pressure flame-front—in a near-hypersonic flow without disturbing shock waves. An animal nobody had ever seen. These results plunged us into chaos for a couple of months. The Air Force made special funds available. Ted drafted more co-workers into the project, among them an excellent engineer, who designed a highly unorthodox, hypersonic multi-slit-nozzle which took weeks to manufacture. Meanwhile, George Emanuel, a theoretical gasdynamicist developed a complex computer model of the reaction. One morning, we had just installed the slit nozzle, an Air Force captain showed up to inspect our progress. It was very early, and I was alone in the lab with my two technicians. We started our laser machine and—nothing happened. The Air Force Captain smiled, shook my hand, and left. Two hours later he called back: "As of this moment all your work is classified." I blurted out, "But why? Nothing happened!" "Haven't you found out yet?" said the captain, "you burnt out all mirrors, when you turned the machine on!" –He was right. For the next months we spoke in tongues. The experiments chased each other at breathtaking speed. The power output reached a full kilowatt. Visitors from every part of the laser community showed up. Edward Teller appeared with an entourage of high defense department brass and slapped me on the shoulder: "Continue, this is excellent work. More important than the atomic bomb!" I was crushed, the last thing I wanted to be involved in. Only our own upper management at Aerospace was unhappy—the Air Force showered us with more discretionary funding than anyone else in the Aerospace Laboratory Division could boast—Ted and I turned unmanageable. The pressures were mounting, and I became a victim of high blood-pressure and unpleasant heart palpitations. By early 1971 I was stressed-out, decided to forego an advancement, and take a leave of absence with my entire family at Karl Kompa's lab in Munich. Sometime in June 1969 the Air Force had convened a topical conference on gasdynamic lasers in St. Louis. Ted had obliged every person in our group to give a talk on his special contribution to our work—except on the latest experiment with the new nozzle.
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